5 Reasons for Kids to Build with Digital Toys

Kids love playing with physical blocks. Here's how they can learn and explore with digital blocks!

By

Ingrid Simone, Toca Magazine Executive Editor

Categories

Playing with blocks — the physical toy pieces — can help kids build spatial reasoning skills and mathematical thinking, according to current research. Building with digital toys like Toca Blocks can allow kids to learn and explore in different and complementary ways. It’s not an either-or: There are great reasons to build with both physical and digital toys. Here are five of the reasons building with digital toys can be a great experience for kids.

1. Dream bigger. If you’ve ever watched a kid construct a fantasy home, a town or even an entire world in a digital toy, you know that kids can create grand creations in a relatively short amount of time. Compared to physical building toys, kids aren’t as limited by the number of toys, physical space, toddler siblings in the knock-everything-over-phase or risky cats.

2. Build on the go. Yes, kids can take a handful of physical pieces with them on the go, but with digital devices they can bring along the entire world they’ve constructed.

3. Share and collaborate. In the digital world, it’s often easy for kids to share their work with others as well as work together — even if they’re not in the same room.

4. Take risks. Because it’s easy to revise digital creations kids can take more risks with their creations.

5. Preserve ever-expanding creations. Unless you’ve got a wing of your home dedicated to building toys, typically kids will have to take apart what they’ve made with physical toys. With digital toys, they can preserve their work and return to it weeks, months, even years later.

In Toca Blocks, kids can snap a pic of their creation and share it with a friend using a unique Blocks code. Then the friend can import the world to explore themselves!

A bonus reason for parents: You won’t step on pieces of digital building toys.